“Lucy wrestled with all kinds of things that didn’t have words back then. And it wasn’t just the lack of vocabulary; Lucy had no guidance. No YouTube or LGBT groups. No Oprah or Ellen.”

In The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell, William Klaber takes the reader into the mind of a woman trying to live on her own terms, and finding both acceptance and rejection along the way. In an era where same-sex unions are still being challenged, the question of gender identity has been raised by well-received writers like Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet) and Emma Donoghue (Frog Music) and it’s interesting to come across a new treatment of gender-bending set in mid-19th century America. This was, after all, a time when the frontier was pushing outward as a society dominated by white males, still challenged by the remnants of a population seen as “other” by the settlers. It’s no coincidence, I believe, that Lucy Lobdell has a strong sympathy for the Native American tribes.

The acceptance shown in the novel by some (by no means all) characters who encounter Lucy Ann Lobdell’s rebellious spirit might be the most surprising challenge to our perceptions of the 19th-century mind, and yet it is based on fact. Klaber refers to newspaper articles where Lucy’s relationship with a woman was sympathetically described, and her 1858 trial for wearing men’s clothing was dismissed because she had violated no state or local laws. Later in Klaber’s novel, Lucy and her wife Marie are helped materially by the woman who loved her as a man before her real gender became widely known.

And yet Lucy, or Joseph as she preferred to be called, could not live in peace either with herself or with her neighbors, and spent the last thirty years of her life in insane asylums without Marie. Even before that, Lucy-Joseph and Marie’s bonding—kept in the public eye along with the memory of the trial by Lucy-Joseph’s talent for getting arrested—was singular enough for the time that it attracted considerable journalistic attention, adding to the burdens borne by a couple who claimed to want to be left alone to live as they wished. Addressing a journalist who had written about the couple in generally considerate terms, Marie—quoted in Klaber’s factual final chapter—seized on the term “strange conduct” to which she retorted, “I do not know why the companionship of two women should be termed ‘strange.’ The opposite sex are often seen in close companionship, and, Mr. Ham, my sex are not inferior to yours.”

William Klaber, who lived in a house connected with Lucy-Joseph, took on the complex task of unfolding her* tale from her own viewpoint after being asked by a local historian to write what was originally intended to be a biography. Applying fiction to history, Klaber told me, was his choice to allow readers “to enter rooms otherwise denied them” by the historical record. Klaber shows Lucy-Joseph—a widow with a child—embarking on her new life as a man as a way to find paying work. She also needed to avoid her only option as a woman, which was to make a distasteful marriage as a means of providing herself and her child with security. “But once Lucy began to pass as a man,” Klaber says, “things began to change. And that’s where the story is—the changes. Lucy didn’t go in search of women, she discovered the attraction only after they became attracted to her. And then she had to make sense of it. And becoming a man was part of how she made sense of it . . . She doesn’t reject being a mother or being a woman so much as she walks a path that goes in only one direction: ‘All I had won by my deceit was some imitation of freedom. Was it a fair trade? I couldn’t say, but I knew one thing for certain—it was irreversible. Having risen, however imperfectly, to the rank of citizen, I could not go back to the indentured world of propriety and deference.’”

Translating Lucy-Joseph’s life into novel form also brought technical challenges. Klaber begins the story at the point where Lucy-Joseph leaves home, disguised fully as a man for the first time, and ends it before her disappearance into the world of the insane asylums. So we are unable to follow her into an environment where she is studied as a case of sexual perversion (giving rise, arguably, to the first use of the word Lesbian to describe woman-to-woman relationships) or see her early life as a hunter who liked to wear her brother’s clothes but willingly entered into a heterosexual marriage. The narrative itself is in two parts, divided by the five or seven years (accounts vary) between the trial and Lucy-Joseph’s reappearance in search of her daughter, during which she lived alone as a hunter. “How,” says Klaber, “can you dramatize five years alone in the woods? You can’t.” And since the thrust of the novel is about Lucy-Joseph’s struggle to live as she wanted within society, I would agree with his choice to omit this period.

All of these complexities are a lot for a novelist to take on, but Klaber focuses on giving Lucy-Joseph her own voice and translating other people’s reactions to her through her eyes. As he says, “Lucy is smart, she is brave, but she is also naïve. She describes things in simple terms. Her thoughts are lean.” She has no labels for herself, and thus as a character she resists our attempts to put labels on her. “There are those already squabbling over whether Lucy was a Lesbian, a transvestite, bi-sexual, or transgender,” says Klaber. “I personally don’t feel the need to fit her into any modern box, but I do think it’s important to remember, and we know this from her early writing, that . . . she was a Feminist, an advocate for women’s rights.” Lucy’s personal narrative is about the freedom to live outside the box into which even the unruly frontier wanted to put her. “When I was young I heard a preacher speak out against the sin of unnatural unions. I didn’t know what those unions were, but a woman loving another woman might surely be one. This troubled me, but not as much as you might suppose. And before I am judged from the far off comfort of a chair, please remember that everything had changed for me. Up was down, red was blue . . . . “

I would like to see a novel based on Lucy-Joseph’s experiences in the asylum, but that would be a completely different novel. What we are allowed to see in The Rebellion of Miss Lucy Ann Lobdell is a becoming, a mind trying to grasp its own identity and build a life in the face of an uncomprehending world.

*Like Mr. Klaber, I refer to Lucy-Joseph by the female pronoun for simplicity’s sake.

About the contributor: Jane Steen was born in England and has lived in three countries, but still manages to hang on to the English accent. She currently resides in the Chicago suburbs with her family, but visits the UK as often as possible. Jane is a self-published author of historical fiction, starting with The House of Closed Doors, the first in a series. She’s also a runner, a knitter and designer of lace shawls, and full-time executive assistant to a cognitively disabled daughter.

TASHA: As a reader and a lover of history, one of the things that delights me about historical fiction is having my beliefs about the past upended by a well-written book. I remember, years ago, picking up The Memoirs of Cleopatra by Margaret George. I was hooked from the first page—the writing is engaging, the story mesmerizing, and the characters some of my all-time favorites. Best of all, I learned that all the things I thought I knew about Cleopatra were not true. She wasn’t the conniving seductress that Hollywood and Caesar Augustus would have us believe her to be. But—but—I’d heard all about Cleopatra. She was a tramp, not a good queen, right? We all know this. And she wasn’t really all that good-looking. Didn’t she have a big nose?

Photo by Charles Osgood

Not according to the actual historical sources. In fact, she was a strong, intelligent ruler who spoke so many languages fluently that she didn’t need to rely on translators at her court. Didn’t need translators? Could that really be true? I never would have guessed it, but then I didn’t spend the four years Margaret George did researching her topic. Her novel consumed me so much that I was inspired to start reading more about Cleopatra, and history confirmed what George included in her book. Talk about a fantastic reading experience.

As a novelist, I do my best to get the historical details I include in my books correct. I have spent years studying primary sources and combing through the secondary ones, committed to accuracy. One of the things that becomes apparent almost at once when you start delving into history is that many of the assumptions we have about the past aren’t actually true. How many of us have heard the story of the advice Queen Victoria gave to one of her daughters the night before the girl was married? “Lie back and think of England…” Trouble is, Victoria never said that. It wasn’t even a Victorian invention—the original source came from a journal entry written in 1912 by an Edwardian woman, Lady Alice Hillingdon.

But we do know that Victorians were prudish, don’t we? We have bought hook, line, and sinker the Edwardians’ view of their stodgy Victorian grandparents, but is it correct? I have a hard time agreeing with that bit of conventional wisdom after having looked at a set of floor plans to an English country estate. The lady of the house and her housekeeper had marked them up in preparation for a weekend party, with the names of the guests written to indicate the bedrooms to which they had been assigned. It wasn’t quite that simple, however. There were further notations to inform the staff which room many of the guests would be in for their morning tea, so that it would be delivered to the proper place—and that often was not the room in which the guest started, shall we say. The lady of the house carefully arranged accommodations so that husbands wouldn’t cross paths with their wives lovers’ in the corridor en route to a tryst. In a time when many upper-class marriages were arranged, with more concern given to preserving fortunes and titles, love could be lacking. It was commonly accepted that both spouses would be free to seek love and affection elsewhere after the nursery was filled, at least with an heir and a spare. Not exactly the stuff of the prudish.

When starting research for a book set in 19th-century Constantinople, I had assumed that the Ottoman women lived with even more social restrictions than ladies in Victorian England. I could not have been more wrong. For example, they owned property separately from their husbands long before their British counterparts, and enjoyed a host of rights unheard of in the west. In the 18th century, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose husband was ambassador in Constantinople, wrote about the freedom of the Ottoman women, detailing conversations she had with her Turkish friends who could not understand why she chose not to wear a veil. Did she not want to be able to meet her lover in a public square without people being able to identify her? The Ottomans were using what we, in the 21st century, often consider an instrument of repression to give themselves freedom. I had never expected that.

I think that as novelists, we ought to give our readers the truth about the time in which our books are set, even if, on occasion, this leads to people assuming we are making mistakes. Rhys, have you come up against this sort of thing while you’re doing research? Have historical facts forced you to change your ideas of what is plausible and accurate?

RHYS: Tasha, I find the writer always has to walk a fine line between what readers expect from a certain period versus what we know to be reality. Some of the vocabulary that was commonly in use in Molly Murphy’s New York can never come into my books because people wouldn’t believe it, and it would jerk the reader out of the period. Who would have thought that “far out” was slang at the time?

Also, I have assembled many photographs of New York in the early 20th century and some of them have amazed me. For example, I have a picture of Macy’s food counter, 1900. And the center of the display is a tower of cans of chili con carne. If I wrote that my heroine went home and opened a can of chili I would be deluged with angry e-mails telling me I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Photo by John Quin-Harkin

Occasionally I get letters telling me that Molly couldn’t possibly have done the dangerous and daring things I have her do. Because we all know that women in Edwardian times were delicate little creatures, prone to swooning and carrying smelling salts. Right? I have to tell you that this is the image MEN created for their women. They even designed an ideal of beauty in clothing that was restrictive and created the illusion of the helpless little lady, needing male protection. Women only fainted because corsets didn’t allow women to breathe properly.

And the reality was that women around the turn of the 20th century were doing amazing things—riding across the Arabian desert and dealing with wild tribesmen, mounting an expedition to the North Pole, or working on spectacular advances in science. Investigative reporter Nellie Bly showed that it was possible to go around the world in less than eighty days. She also had herself admitted to an insane asylum to report on the deplorable conditions there.

But at the same time, women were not allowed to vote. They were not allowed to own property. They could be beaten by their husbands. So, I write about a time that was in many ways so modern—automobiles and electric light and movies were all part of life, and yet half the population couldn’t have a say in who ran the country. I didn’t start out my series to highlight feminism, but with Molly’s strong sense of justice I find that women’s rights tend to creep into each of my books.

I find it is good to remind people how far we have come in a hundred years.

About the contributors:

Tasha Alexander is the author of the Lady Emily novels, most recently The Counterfeit Heiress. She attended the University of Notre Dame, where she signed on as an English major in order to have a legitimate excuse for spending all her time reading. She and her husband, novelist Andrew Grant, divide their time between Chicago and the UK.

Rhys Bowen is the author of the award-winning Molly Murphy mysteries. The newest in the series, The Edge of Dreams, comes out March 3, 2015. Her novels have garnered an impressive array of awards and nominations, including the Anthony Award for her novel For the Love of Mike and the Agatha Award for Murphy’s Law. She has also written Her Royal Spyness, a series about a minor royal in 1930s England. When not writing she loves to travel, sing, hike, play her Celtic harp, and entertain her grandchildren. She lives in San Rafael, California.

]]>http://historicalnovelsociety.org/tasha-alexander-and-rhys-bowen-discuss-reality-versus-expectations-when-presenting-history-in-novels/feed/3Things Half in Shadow: Alan Finn on Spiritualism in Post-bellum Philadelphiahttp://historicalnovelsociety.org/things-half-in-shadow-alan-finn-on-spiritualism-in-post-bellum-philadelphia/
http://historicalnovelsociety.org/things-half-in-shadow-alan-finn-on-spiritualism-in-post-bellum-philadelphia/#commentsSat, 07 Feb 2015 14:50:29 +0000http://historicalnovelsociety.org/?p=36848Philadelphia, 1869. Former soldier Edward Clark has survived the devastating Civil War so many others didn’t, and now he’s an independently wealthy young man who makes himself useful by working as a crime reporter. Edward lives well and has hit a trifecta with his fiancée: she’s rich, kind, and attractive. Things are going swimmingly until he’s given an assignment to write a series of articles debunking the city’s spiritualists — fake mediums defrauding grieving families. It turns out that Edward has secrets of his own, and when one of these mediums, the beautiful and cunning Mrs. Lucy Collins, discovers them, Edward is blackmailed into joining forces with her. Discrediting Philadelphia’s other mediums is just fine with Mrs. Collins, since she can then fill the vacuum left by her disgraced competitors and rake in the profits. Edward and Lucy face bigger problems, however, when a medium they cannot debunk is murdered at a séance they’re attending. Could she possibly have been the real thing? With everyone in the room a suspect, Edward and Lucy attempt to clear themselves by unmasking the real culprit…before both their lives are ruined.

The choice of Philadelphia during this period is a robust one for a setting, providing a wealth of options for historical detail. Alan Finn, author of Things Half in Shadow, says the City of Brotherly Love has “such a rich past that it felt like the perfect place for a story involving mystery, history and spirits. As Edward writes in the book, ‘Wherever the past piles up, layer after dusty layer, ghosts are sure to linger.’ As a bonus, it also has quite a history of Spiritualist shenanigans. Because it was known as the Quaker City and had a reputation for religious tolerance, it seemed to draw charlatans and believers in equal measure.”

The novel explores several interesting locations in post-bellum Philly, among them the Eastern State Penitentiary, the Fairmount Water Works, and Christ Church Burial Ground, where notables such as Benjamin Franklin enjoy their eternal rest. Finn notes that it wasn’t difficult to get a feel for the place: “Philadelphia is a well-preserved city. Many of the locations used in the book are still there and open to visitors. For everything else, I relied on old newspapers, history books and a fantastic guidebook for visitors written in the 1800s. There’s also a wonderful website that features Philadelphia maps dating back hundreds of years. That was extremely helpful in learning the city’s geography during that time.”

Alan Finn is the pen name of an acclaimed author of mysteries and thrillers who has worked as an editor, journalist, and ghostwriter. He lives in Princeton, NJ, USA.

While the setting is evocative, Spiritualism takes center stage here, and plays a key role in the plotting of the novel. The Victorians have long been noted for their obsession with death, and Finn discusses the corollary rise in popularity of the Spiritualism movement: “Spiritualism had a relatively short heyday — about 80 years or so. But it was a fascinating movement in so many ways. There’s the theological aspect, in which upstanding, God-fearing men and women looked for answers beyond what Christianity had to offer. There’s a sociological aspect in terms of fads and frauds and large swaths of the public believing something that most of us would scoff at today. Then there’s the supernatural element: Were some of those mediums truly able to commune with the dead? Can spirits really contact us from the Great Beyond?”

The Victorian era was intriguing to Finn primarily because it was a period of great change, and thus great possibility. But there was also an undercurrent of darkness: “So much was happening in science, industry and society. Anything seemed possible. Yet life spans were still alarmingly short, compared with today, and in America, of course, the Civil War just decimated entire families. So people tended to romanticize death, I think more as a way of coping than anything else. When you combine that sense of loss and romanticism about death with that sense of hope and possibility, people tend to want to believe anything.”

While Spiritualism is pivotal to the plot, what Finn has created here is, in essence, a locked room mystery that will be familiar to fans of Conan Doyle and other literary mystery greats. Finn says he wanted “to create a scenario that, on the surface, seemed unexplainable, as if something otherworldly had taken place. Making it a locked room mystery really added to that feeling.” He kept not only Arthur Conan Doyle in mind while writing, but also Agatha Christie: “Both of them excelled at hiding the answer in plain sight while surrounding it with very interesting diversions.”

One of these diversions comes in the character of none other than P.T. Barnum, who is also in attendance at the séance where the medium is murdered. The “sucker born every minute” philosophy attributed to him (though he most probably never uttered it) seems particularly relevant when one is speaking of debunking mediums who use what Finn calls “parlor tricks — literally smoke and mirrors” to fool customers into thinking they’re communing with dead loved ones. Finn notes that “many of the so-called mediums of the day were ingenious illusionists,” but in the novel, what Barnum is seeking is the “real thing” — someone who can truly summon and speak with the dead. Barnum realizes that, if such a person exists, or at least is convincing enough to fool the average sucker, then he can make a mint showcasing such an act to sensation-hungry crowds. Finn wanted to include a few real historical figures in his tale, and “Barnum was the perfect man for the job. In addition to being a showman, he also took great delight in debunking Spiritualism. It was fun tossing him into the mix and seeing how he’d react.”

While the ending of Finn’s novel gives closure, it also seems to set up further adventures for Edward and Lucy. Finn admits that he has more planned for them: “Everything about the city, that time period and the world of Spiritualism is fascinating to me. There’s so much about it that I’ve yet to explore, in real life and in fiction.”

Things Half in Shadow was published in December 2014 by Gallery Books, ISBN 9781476761725, 448pp.

About the contributor: Bethany Latham is an Associate Professor and Librarian, and the Managing Editor of HNR.

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]]>http://historicalnovelsociety.org/stunts-horses-cowboys-molly-gloss-on-the-dark-underbelly-of-the-cowboy-myth/feed/0Indie Roundup: A Look at Exceptional Indie HF of 2014http://historicalnovelsociety.org/indie-roundup-a-look-at-exceptional-indie-hf-of-2014/
http://historicalnovelsociety.org/indie-roundup-a-look-at-exceptional-indie-hf-of-2014/#commentsSun, 01 Feb 2015 01:00:37 +0000http://historicalnovelsociety.org/?p=35943There were two things I wanted to do when I took over as Managing Editor for the HNS Indie Reviews: 1. Encourage good quality – if the end result is poorly produced it can spoil the reading experience. The Indie Editorial Team, consisting of myself, Janis Pegrum Smith and Nicky Galliers in the UK, and US-based Steve Donoghue – plus all our wonderful volunteer reviewers – take into account how a novel looks as well as how it is written. 2. Introduce an HNS Indie Award. For 2014 the winners and runners up were difficult to choose; for the forthcoming 2015 Award it is proving even harder! All novels submitted for Indie Review are eligible; if your book is chosen as an Editor’s Choice it is automatically added to the longlist, from which a shortlist and eventual finalists are selected.

Two favourites of US Editor Steve Donoghue were 1914 by Charles B. Smith – an “impressive debut novel” – and The Art Procurer by Jeff Ridenour – “plenty of intrigue, a surprising amount of humor… a remarkable and sometimes quite sad worldly wisdom.” The Spirit Room by Marschel Paul was reviewed by Sarah Johnson because she thoroughly enjoyed it, while My Lady Viper: Tales from the Tudor Court by E. Knight and The Love Letter of John Henry Holliday by Mary Fancher became strong US shortlist contenders.

From the UK enjoyable reads were provided by Anna Belfrage with two more episodes of her Graham Saga: Serpents in the Garden and Revenge and Retribution; these are superb timeslip novels brimming with seventeenth-century detail and adventure: “The action races along towards a terrifying climax… period and place are brought vividly to life, with smells, sounds, plants, food and stunning geographical descriptions.”

Another novel by David Ebsworth passed muster in the form of a fascinating story of the Zulu Wars: The Kraals of Ulundi. “An accomplished, rich, beautifully produced and very rewarding read.”

Good reads, too, came with A Just and Upright Man by R J Lynch and another in the Roma Nova AlternativeHistory series, Successio by Alison Morton: “Absolutely recommended and well worth a read.” The Evergreen in Red and White by Steven Kay makes clear that “the life and work of a professional footballer in the 1890s was very different from the modern image.” After reading The Liverpool Connection by Elisabeth Marrion, the reviewer complimented the author whose “talent lies in the details, the description and portrayal of the times.”

I was pleased that The Tribute Bride became an Editor’s Choice; the author, Theresa Tomlinson, has an immense talent. So does J D Smith, whose excellent novel, Tristan and Iseult, was singled out as“A great adaptation of a legend.” I remember a pop hit from years back, Tokolosh Man, but had no idea what it meant; thanks to In the Shadow of the Tokolosh by Conrad K, I’ve been enlightened. The review noted “… breathtaking descriptions of Africa.”

Finally, a book that would perhaps not fit mainstream because it is different – it is here that Indie comes into its own. A Day of Fire was written by an ‘Inspiration’ of six authors (what is the group name for authors?) who came together to write their own individual chapters about one dramatic event – Pompeii. Nothing original in that? Well, “the originality lies in the extremely smooth and professional way it has been done.” A firm contender for the Award shortlist, I think!

My thanks to Steve, Janis, Nicky and all our reviewers. We have a harder task than the mainstream reviewers because, for Indie, there is no intermediary agent or publisher. Some submissions, unfortunately, are not of a standard to warrant a review, but finding the gems is an absolute delight! As an Indie author myself, I can speak for all historical fiction Indie authors when I say: “Thank you HNS for so enthusiastically supporting us.”

]]>http://historicalnovelsociety.org/indie-roundup-a-look-at-exceptional-indie-hf-of-2014/feed/0History is Written by the Victors?http://historicalnovelsociety.org/history-is-written-by-the-victors/
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